Fwd: DITA 1.3 "XML mention" question

[Nancy Harrison <nharrison@infobridge-solutions.com>]

Hi,

I received a very interesting piece of mail (see below) as a response to the DITA 1.3 webinar, and I think we may need to discuss it tomorrow.  We seem to have lost track of a small but telling piece of the XML spec, that reserves element names beginning with 'xml' or 'XML' for the use of the XML standard itself.  This conflicts with our use of those letters to begin a number of elements in our XML Mention domain.

We may need to revisit those element names, unless someone has a good reason for why we wouldn't have to follow that part of the spec.

I responded to Sandor thanking him for his extremely pertinent comment.

Regards,

Nancy

_____________
Nancy Harrison
Infobridge Solutions 
nharrison@infobridge-solutions.com

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Kekesi, Sandor (LNG-HBE) <sandor.kekesi@lexisnexis.com>
Date: Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 11:12 AM
Subject: DITA 1.3 "XML mention" question
To: "nharrison@infobridge-solutions.com" <nharrison@infobridge-solutions.com>

Hi Nancy,

 

I attended the 8/7 webinar and had a question on the DITA Domains component of the presentation, in particular “XML mention”.  I wasn’t sure how to direct this question to the TC so I hope you don’t mind that I’m emailing you directly.

 

So on to my question:  I was wondering if the TC had considered the proposed naming of the XML mention markup “xmlelement” might be in conflict with the following (highlighted) portion of the XML TR:

 

 

http://www.w3.org/TR/xml/

3 Logical Structures

[Definition: Each XML document contains one or more elements, the boundaries of which are either delimited by start-tags and end-tags, or, for empty elements, by an empty-element tag. Each element has a type, identified by name, sometimes called its "generic identifier" (GI), and may have a set of attribute specifications.] Each attribute specification has a name and a value.

Element

[39]	element	::=	EmptyElemTag
			| STag content ETag	[WFC: Element Type Match]
				[VC: Element Valid]

This specification does not constrain the application semantics, use, or (beyond syntax) names of the element types and attributes, except that names beginning with a match to (('X'|'x')('M'|'m')('L'|'l')) are reserved for standardization in this or future versions of this specification.

 

 

My team here at LexisNexis has been using DITA for a few years now; we had designed a similar domain customization to delimit XML and PATH structures, and at first we similarly named these elements beginning with “xml…” but then reversed course when we realized that the XML TR mentioned that such naming is reserved.

 

Just wanted to bring this to your attention and curious to know if the TC had indeed considered this and to learn their rationale for whether there is a conflict or if there’s an allowable usage of an element name beginning with “xml” here.

 

Thanks,

 

Sandor Kekesi

LexisNexis

Sr. Content Engineer

Jersey City, New Jersey

201.435.2051

sandor.kekesi@lexisnexis.com